15 Trivia Tidbits for Saturday, April 19, 2025
Humans 20,000 years ago had bigger brains that we do, by a wide margin. No one back then would score well on IQ tests (for starters, they had no pencils), but if there’s such a thing as raw brain power, it’s possible that they had more of it than we do but just hadn’t figured out how to use it.
You’re never going to add a tennis ball of mass to your brain, but you can still get smarter by learning stuff. Below, learn a bit about drinking, stealing and what happens when everything goes boom.
Art Film
Willem Dafoe was kicked out of school for making porn. He wasn’t really making porn, he said. He was interviewing people for his communications class, and one subject brought out his porn collection. Dafoe planned not to include this footage in the final cut, but the teacher still saw it.
What Are the Odds?
The officers at one U.S. naval storage facility in 1944 would place bets on whose team of men could load up ships the fastest. This proved unwise because these were untrained men loading explosives, and it resulted in an explosion that killed 320 people.
Open the Schools
The 1974 movie Death Wish was followed by the sequel Death Wish II, and then another sequel called Death Wish 3. You might notice that they didn’t use roman numerals for that second sequel. They were going to, then the marketing department decided that moviegoers don’t understand roman numerals.
Just Got Served
To serve someone with a lawsuit, you really need to just go up to them. In 2013, a nightclub served Ciara with papers by having someone approach her and give them to her when she was performing onstage, as though asking for her autograph.
Against Your Interests
In 1994, the New Jersey Nets wanted to change their name to the New Jersey Swamp Dragons, thinking a cool cartoon mascot would be popular with kids. The NBA’s Board of Governors voted on the change, and they approved it 26 to 1. But it turned out the lone dissenter was somehow the rep from the Nets themselves, so the change never happened.
NBA
Three Tequila, Floor
In 2001, a Mexican prank show called No te Equivoques went to a club and challenged a 19-year-old to drink 40 shots of tequila, in hopes of winning a bottle of wine. The young man died, and the show was canceled. But the host of the show went on to some fame: He was Tony Dalton, who then acted in Better Call Saul and Daredevil: Born Again.
Be Divine
Adele’s first single was a British techno song released in 2006. Not only is the song completely forgotten now — the DJ who was credited as the track’s main artist never released anything again.
No Attachments
In the Muria tribe in India, a boy will be punished if he is caught sleeping with the same girl for three consecutive nights. This isn’t because he has committed a repeat offense. It’s because sticking to one girl is monogamy, which must be avoided.
One Hundred Years
In 1887, doctors synthesized a painkiller named phenacetin. In the 1950s, drug companies came up with the idea of marketing it as Femicin, a drug specifically for relief from menstrual symptoms. It took till the 1980s for the FDA to ban it — for causing cancer.
Lucrative I.P.
You might not have been aware that the guy below from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is an established character from the comics. But it earned comic artist Jim Starlin more royalties than he’d made (at the time) from every Marvel movie — though this was also the artist behind such characters as Drax, Gamora and Thanos.
Warner Bros.
Alien Conspiracy
The 1982 video game E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is remembered as huge failure, which brought down the company Atari. But while it didn’t sell as much as Atari hoped, the game sold some two million copies, making it one of the best-selling games ever released for that system.
Liquid Courage
Late in 1990, Freddie Mercury’s AIDS had progressed to a point that he had trouble walking, and Queen doubted whether he’d be able to handle the new song they were recording, “The Show Must Go On.” But he handled it just fine, thanks to a special medication: a shot of vodka right before getting behind the mic.
Book ’Em
Britain jailed a man dubbed “The Tome Raider” in 2002, for stealing rare books, including two copies of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. When he was released, he wised up. He made sure to wear a long beard and glasses the next time he tried stealing more books.
Hollywood Ending
The movie Steve Jobs ends with Jobs presenting his daughter with a sketch that she’d made on a computer years earlier. His keeping it all those years shows how he always cared about her. This scene was completely made up for the movie and made us all a little stupider.
Weird Twist
If you put on the Weird Al album Off the Deep End and just leave it playing, it’ll end with 10 minutes of silence. Then you’ll hear Al suddenly screaming. This was a nice way to scare anyone who didn’t remember to take the disc out.
